July 9, 2014

National Center for Education Statistics Report: “Baccalaureate and Beyond: A First Look at the Employment Experiences and Lives of College Graduates, 4 Years On (B&B:08/12),” by Emily Forrest Cataldi, Peter Siegel, Bryan Shepherd, and Jennifer Cooney (NCES 2014141, July 2014, .pdf format, 59p.).

Institute national d’etudes demographique [Paris, France] Periodical: Population and Societies (No. 513, July/August 2014, .pdf format, 4p.). Note: The title article of this issue is: “Unsafe abortion still frequent across the world but less often fatal,” by Clementine Rossier.

A. “Prevalence of U.S. Food Insecurity Is Related to Changes in Unemployment, Inflation, and the Price of Food,” by Mark Nord, Alisha Coleman-Jensen, and Christian Gregory (Economic Research Report No. (ERR-167), June 2014, .pdf format, 30p.).

A. “Recent macroeconomic trends in emerging economies and implications for development Country Study: Brazil,” by Eustáquio Reis (DWP/134, June 2014, .pdf format, 18p.).

Abstract:

The paper reviews the sluggish growth and inclusive developments of the Brazilian economy in the last decade. The first section analyzes the macroeconomic performance pointing export growth as the engine of growth. The second evaluates social policies and their relationship with the improvements in the labor market. The third examines Brazilian policy reactions to the global crisis that managed to recover consumption but failed to sustain investment and growth. The discussion of challenges for a sustainable development concludes the paper. Investment in education and infrastructure are consensual policy advices but there are plenty of disagreements and controversies with regards to industrial policies, financing strategies and the role to be played by the public sector.

B. “A comparative study of the forecasting performance of three international organizations,” by Pingfan Hong and Zhibo Tan (DWP/133, June 2014, .pdf format, 13p.).

Abstract:

This article evaluates and compares the forecasting performance of three international organizations: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The annual forecasts made by the United Nations in the period of 1981-2011 are found to be fairly robust, in terms of bias and efficiency. In comparison, the forecasting performance of the United Nations is found to be marginally better than the other two organizations during the period of 2000-2012. However, the forecasts of all these organizations missed the Great Recession of 2009 by a large margin.

US Bureau of Economic Analysis Working Paper: “Supplemental Poverty Measure: A Comparison of Geographic Adjustments with Regional Price Parities vs. Median Rents from the American Community Survey,” by Bettina Aten, Eric Figueroa, Troy Martin, and Trudi Renwick (WP2014-7, March 2014, .pdf format, 29p.).

Abstract:

One of the innovations of the Supplemental Poverty Measure is to make adjustments in the official poverty threshold to account for geographic price level differences, particularly for differences in the cost of shelter as measured by rents. A more recent initiative is to estimate thresholds that include price differences for goods and services other than rents.

The focus in this paper is to compare two types of geographic adjustments: one based on the ACS median rent index (MRI), and one based on a recently published set of state and metropolitan regional price parities (RPPs). The RPPs are of two types: an all item index that includes a broad group of expenditure classes and another that is more narrowly focused on just food, clothing and rents.

The differences between the MRI and the all item RPPs are significant for most states, resulting in higher poverty rates for 15 states and lower rates for 26 states. When the narrower RPPs are used, poverty estimates are higher than the MRI poverty rates in 20 states, lower in 22 states and not statistically different in 9 states. In metropolitan areas, the overall RPPs lower the poverty rates when compared to the MRI, because differences in the combined price level of goods and services are generally not as large as differences in rents. When the RPPs are constrained to food, clothing and rents, the poverty rates in metropolitan areas are greater than the MRI poverty rates.